Kilrah_il writes: Sorry, but this is too cool to pass. A few NASA engineers used their free time, together with many other volunteers to build a Rube Goldberg machine for the music video for OK Go's "This Too Shall Pass". After a few months and dozens of takes you get the result — A beautiful and well-timed machine that does nothing. AmazingLink to Original Source

You seem to think that because a school is private (and especially because it's expensive), that it must be immune from such stupidity. This is not so.

The proper course of action upon seeing your computer infected with viruses is not to throw the computer away and buy a more expensive one. The proper course is to clean up the machine. Similarly, the proper course of action upon seeing stupidity like "zero tolerance" rules and such infecting your public schools is not to abandon the concept of public schools, it's to fix the public schools.

Remember, they're yours and you're paying for them. Get out there and give voice to your ideas, and fight the stupid ideas. Go to school board meetings. Vote. Participate in campaigns. Running away is not the solution.

kfogel writes: Sharron Angle, the Republican candidate for U.S. Senate in Arizona, is using a copyright "cease-and-desist" letter to stop her opponent, incumbent Harry Reid (currently majority leader in the U.S. Senate), from reposting old versions of her campaign website. The old pages are politically sensitive because Angle campaigned from the far right in the primary, but is now toning that down for the general election. One can understand why a politician might want to de-emphasize certain positions after the primary, but using copyright law to censor your opponent from displaying your past positions? Mmmmmm. Shutting down the wayback machine... not gonna work.

The C&D letter is here. (It also accuses the Reid campaign of intending to impersonate Angle's campaign, which seems doubtful, but who knows?)Link to Original Source

Actually, this constitutes gender discrimination, twice over. It's saying men are not allowed to do something women can do: marry a man. And women are not allowed to do something men can do: marry a woman.

Fertility rates are primary inversely dependent on the empowerment of women. If you want to avoid a Malthusian disaster, give women education, a voice in the public sphere, and the power to decide their own reproductive course.

This is why it makes me sad to see PBS sliding into being almost just-another-commercial-outlet. Remember when underwriting acknowledgments at the top of the show were a textual/voiceover mention of the company, and not a whole ad-like video segment? And when no PBS station would be caught dead airing show-length commercials and pretending they're shows?

arcticstoat writes: HDMI's short-lived reign over the TV cable racks could soon be over, thanks to a new usurper that combines several connections into a standard Cat5e/6 network cable with an RJ-45 connector. Designed by a coalition of consumer electronics manufacturers called the HDBaseT Alliance, which includes Sony, Samsung, LG and Valens, HDBaseT promises to not only carry video and audio signals, but also provide a network connection, a USB signal and even electricity using a single cable. The Alliance predicts that we'll start seeing the first HDBaseT equipment creeping into the shops later this year, but says the bigger wave of adoption will occur later in 2011.Link to Original Source